Responsiveness marketing is important. As of this writing I’m handling an issue with my site. It’s down, and I can’t access it. On the phone with MediaTemple, my hosting company, two thoughts come to mind. First, holy cow, I’m getting great service because they are helping me on Thanksgiving in the middle of the night. Awesome.
Second, it’s frustrating that my site isn’t up because I need to be here writing for the people that want to learn about digital marketing.
Thank you to Edward for fixing the issue for me. Turns out some plugins needed to be updated!
Responsiveness is important for marketers. Here are three ways that marketers can use existing tools to respond to the rapidly changing marketplace.
1. Facebook Ad Data
When running ads in Facebook you’ll know very quickly how a campaign is performing. After the first three days of media you’ll have a good idea of the clicks, views and conversions that are generated from your campaign. At this point you can choose to increase your spend to push more towards a campaign that’s working, or you can optimize by creative, targeting or objective.
If you run multiple creative variations you’ll see a good view of the iterations that resonate best with your audience. For example, in a recent campaign I ran the same video, but with five different thumbnails, all from the video. There’s one that did really well for the metrics I was looking at, so I paused all the variations except for the one that was performing the best.
This same principle applies to all display and search ad campaigns. Facebook is the most accessible, to small and midsize businesses, but through our optimization tools we look at performance data for display ads and video ads across publisher partners.
2. Testing Copy
Work with Twitter to run sponsored tweets with copy variations that you are considering. This allows marketers to be responsive to exactly what the audience likes. You can do the same with pictures and videos. Run the ads at a minimal spend and see which copy, pictures and video works the best for you. Do this in Twitter because you’re more likely to see a vote (via an engagement – favorite, retweet, or a comment) as the content streams into the user’s newsfeed. This method works well especially with copy because of the copy driven nature of Twitter.
3. Message To The Moment
Marketing is a story telling business. Be in tune with the season and current events. Use your creative space to speak to your audience using language and visuals of the moment. Many people in social media speak to this with a content calendar. The content calendar will capture the entire strategy, the content to be posted, current events and any seasonality to be included.
Similarly, it’s important for advertisers to deliver messaging that speaks to the moment. In Facebook it’s especially easy to do this by using their stock photo feature. For larger marketers pick the events that connect to your audience and capture that spirit in your ads, even if you are not an official sponsor. Notably advertisers will tout the Big Game, when referencing the Super Bowl. This is a great way to be relevant without having to sponsor the Super Bowl.
Story telling is a way of resonating with audiences, being responsive marketers, and speaking to their innate desires in a way that compels buyers to connect with a brand and make a purchase.
